– Dr. Bonnie L Walker, DC, Dipl Ac, L Ac 9/9/18

“From the center, you can see everything” has always been a guiding principle of Jung Tao’s mission. This rule applies across the board and applies to all we do. It’s expressed from microcosm to macrocosm and infuses our entire reality. This center is pivotal to all we do; from the focus on the Classics that root our understanding of energetics, to the grounding in the natural laws that operate the universe that inform our symbiotic relationship with biomedical science. We experience that center in our practice of Taiji Quan by sensing the center of gravity in the Dan Tien. And we tune in to the resonance of our patients’ center with our own Dan Tien when we palpate their pulses.

This is the reason why personal cultivation is a central theme at Jung Tao. It’s the prime directive in Taiji and will make you a better doctor. The practitioner has the responsibility to develop and cultivate their own center to the extent it can be used as a reliable point of reference in evaluating their patient. If you, as a health care practitioner, allow yourself to become unbalanced, you have no way to judge where the patient’s imbalance arises from. How will you know when the patient is balanced if your own level is “half a bubble off plumb”?

We are also committed to the central principle championed by our late esteemed mentor, Dr. Nguyen van Nghi, who stated, “There is only one Medicine.” When you stand in the center and experience the juxtaposition between energetic medicine and biomedicine, you see what he meant. When you see changes in objective lab and imaging results in response to something as seemingly innocuous as inserting a few fine needles at strategic places, waving burning herbs over them or changing their diet, you’re standing at that center he was talking about. You’re influencing matter with energy. It’s not even the integration of two disparate systems; it’s the experience of the singularity where they already exist as one.

Our central mission as a health care practitioner is to simply give the patient back to themselves. We are here to help them from where they are to where they want to be. As practitioners, we have many tools to accomplish that task, but the first question should be, “What’s not causing health?” We look for the root that’s out of balance, the thing at their center that’s destabilizing the system. Once the diagnosis is achieved, the treatment becomes self-evident. As the Ling Shu states, “In general, the principles of the use of the needles consists of rendering full the empty, decrease what is too full, eliminate stagnated blood and weaken the perverse energy to be victorious.”

Simple, right? No, we think it can’t possibly be that simple. So, we become muddled in the endless minutiae of the myriad creatures and think we must come up with some fancy formula or complicated process to solve the problem.  We can easily become distracted by the gadget sellers, the “peanut vendors” as van Nghi called them, who convince us they have the secret formula. Our own lack of confidence in the power of nature to heal, the power of homeostasis, leads to overcomplicating the situation. We just need to realize that we’re not the one doing the healing. At best, we are nothing more than the midwife in this process of the patient reclaiming their own health and balance.

But all the answers can be found at the center. It truly can become that simple, yes, if we can just get out of our own way, realize this is about the patient, not us, stay centered in the laws of nature and rooted in the Classics, and serve our role as a midwife for the Tao.

Dr. Bonnie L Walker, DC, Dipl Ac, L. Ac. began her studies in Classical Chinese Medicine with an apprenticeship with Dr. Sean Marshall in 1993 and continued her advanced training with Dr. Tran viet Dzung from 2001-2012. She was one of the original founding faculty members of Jung Tao School of Classical Chinese Medicine.